reasoning
Applied AI interview questions tagged reasoning, across every topic.
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Concepts behind "reasoning"
The curriculum that explains the ideas these questions test.
Foundational
Chain-of-Thought and In-Context LearningIn-context learning is the ability to perform a task from instructions or a few examples in the prompt, with no weight updates. Chain-of-thought prompting asks the model to reason step by step before answering, which markedly improves multi-step problems (math, logic, multi-hop questions). The catch is that the stated reasoning is not guaranteed to reflect the model's actual computation. Applied-AI interviews probe it because it is the cheapest accuracy boost on hard tasks, and because over-trusting the visible reasoning is a real pitfall.🧠 Foundations of LLMs & GenAI
Foundational
Agents and Tool UseAn agent is an LLM in a loop that can take actions through tools: it reasons, calls a tool (search, a database, code, an API), observes the result, and repeats until done. Tool calling works because the model emits a structured request that your code executes, the model never runs anything itself. The power is doing real work; the cost is reliability and the safety surface (an agent that can act can act wrongly). Applied-AI interviews probe it because agents are where LLMs meet real systems.🤖 Retrieval & Agents
Core
Self-Consistency, Tree-of-Thought, and Prompt ChainingThree ways to push past a single linear chain of thought: self-consistency samples many reasoning paths and votes on the answer, tree-of-thought branches and searches over partial reasoning, and prompt chaining splits one hard prompt into a sequence of focused calls. Each trades extra tokens and latency for accuracy or control. Applied AI interviews probe this to see if you can reach for the right technique instead of reflexively spending 40 samples on every request.🧠 Foundations of LLMs & GenAISign in
Core
Agent Design Patterns: ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, ReflectionThese are the named control-flow architectures for LLM agents: ReAct interleaves reasoning and actions in a tight loop, plan-and-execute decomposes the task up front and then runs the steps, and reflection adds a self-critique pass that revises output. Each trades latency, token cost, and robustness differently. Applied AI interviews probe this to see whether you pick a pattern from task structure rather than defaulting to one loop for everything.🤖 Retrieval & AgentsSign in
